A New Country and City Await

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When traveling by bus expect to hit every small town in between your departure and arrival town

Last Night in Lagos

I left Kel back at our apartment and went over to Lazy Jacks to post our day’s blog. She took a while to come meet me because she was enjoying left-overs from our Chinese dinner the night before. I had a few beers by time she arrived and by time she finished poking on the internet I was pretty much drunk.

Kel talked one of the bartenders into cooking us beef curry for dinner which was pretty darn good. While I was eating, the cat which hangs out at the bar came by and joined me for a little while. Kel and I are both enamored of animals in general; specially since we got our dog Catfish. I’ve never been into cats but without our dog, a cat will do for a little animal pet-fest.

The reason we stuck around for dinner, when we could have gone on to a better restaurant, was the fact that the nightly entertainment singer/guitar player had talked me into sticking around and playing guitar with him (I can here the laughter from Paul Lusk the guitarist I’ve played music with for years). Kel got some good pictures of me playing Honky Tonk Woman and Sweet Home Alabama with the guy. For a guy from Newcastle he did a pretty good job playing the country rock sort of stuff.

Traveling beyond Portugal

We hopped on the bus today at 1:45pm hoping that the signs were right and that the trip was about 4 hours. We were rudely introduced to how incorrect we were as we hit every small town between Lagos and Sevilla. I joke you not that in the 160 km (appx 110 miles) we stopped 7 times. The 3 hour trip by car became a 6 hour trip by bus that made even my stable stomached wife into a queasy ball of mush. Thankfully we sat in the front row of the bus so we could see the road which helped me immensely. One more learning for your list of travel dos and don’ts: Always bring extra food with you even if you don’t think you’ll need it. I mention this because after 6 hours on the bus, a half hour walk to the hotel and a short walk around town to get acclimated, it was about 10pm (Spain is an hour later than Portugal (6 hours ahead of East Coast USA time).

We quenched our thirst and quelled our hunger at a local restaurant that was quite good. Since we hadn’t spent much money for the day we decided to splurge which amounted to about a 60 euro dinner. We loved the manchego cheese and chorizo sausage appetizer we had and Kel’s peppermint sorbet was amazing.

Now we are getting ready for bed in the tiniest hotel room I’ve ever been in. It will be interesting to see how we sleep as we just discovered there is one big pillow that spans the bed instead of two little ones.

I’ll be posting this tomorrow morning hopefully, so sorry you didn’t get this yesterday!

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Comments

[Sticks Hicks]

The Universal language
I was wondering how well you would manage away from the guitbox. That was one of my favorite things on the road in Europe - sitting in with the locals. Music is meant to share. Thanks Kel for the pics!